CALCULATIONS AND CONCEALMENTS: INFANTICIDE IN MID–NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITAIN

Abstract

ON 23 DECEMBER 1858, theTimesreported the proceedings of the trial in Reading of Mary Newell, a servant, for the willful murder of her three-month-old child, whose body had been discovered in the Thames by boys who had gone fishing. Since Newell herself had admitted the crime in a statement to the constables who came to her mother's house to arrest her, the focus of the trial was not so much on establishing the guilt or innocence of the prisoner as it was on determining what could have motivated such an extreme and seemingly unnatural act of violence in order to decide the severity of her punishment. According to the testimony of a fellow inmate in the workhouse where she lived, Newell had been “a kind and affectionate mother” to the infant and had “suckled it to the last”; the prisoner's defense counsel, seeking to reconcile this description with the seriousness of her crime, invited the medical witness to affirm that she might have been “seized by a destructive impulse” that made her “destroy [that] to which [she] was most fondly attached.” While Newell's defense hoped to establish mental instability as the likeliest conceivable explanation for her act, the prisoner's confession to the constables, describing her hopelessness on being turned away by the child's father, pointed to another motivation, that of economic desperation: “I went to the father of it, and he refused to give me anything, and I told him I would swear the baby, or have a summons for him. He said I might do so. He put on his coat and left me in the shop…. I stood there till his sister put up the shutters. She said it was no use to stop any longer, he would not be home till 11 or 12. I walked the town till 12, being destitute of a farthing. I walked down the Forbury to the King's Meadow. I undressed the baby and laid it by the side on the bank, and let the baby roll in. Afterwards I walked up and down to see if I could see him come indoors. After that I went and got over into a field, and sat under a hedge–it was in a turnip field–till morning…. I saw him at Christmas and he said he would pay for the child.” (“Criminal Courts” 23 Dec. 1858)